Review of "Path to Power" by Robert Caro

I remember reading part of one of Caro’s books about Lyndon Johnson several years ago and being so disgusted with Johnson that I couldn’t finish the book, and had no inclination to pick up another. Yet over the past month or two I’ve developed a taste for biography, so the first book in the series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, called Path to Power, seemed like a good bet.

I admit that it’s difficult to walk away from the first volume without really disliking Johnson as a person and as a politician. Caro himself, in the introduction, says that all of Johnson’s campaigns were “amoral” and that throughout his life, wherever he was, Johnson was always disliked by nearly everyone – except by those who could help him. What a way for a biographer to introduce his subject.

A couple of scenes that Caro describes of Johnson’s youth stick out in my head: Johnson as a young boy, unable to be the leader of the local sandlot baseball game, takes his baseball and walks home; Johnson as a college man provoking someone to attack him and then running away and falling backwards onto a bed, kicking his feet in the air, saying “Enough! Enough!”; Johnson screaming to high heaven when he’s lightly spanked for doing something wrong.

Of course a reader of Caro’s book is also struck by how talented Johnson was at playing politics. He was incredibly successful at a really young age. Luck had something to do with it; being from oil-rich Texas had something to do with it; having no morals had something to do with it. But there were a lot of amoral, lucky young Texans who didn’t become president.

I’m surprised at how involved Roosevelt was in the political game. I had always thought he had won and kept his power based on his moral superiority. But he couldn’t have been elected to 4 terms without being a master at the same game Johnson played: getting people to do things for him. Though Caro only deals with Roosevelt indirectly, I get the idea that Roosevelt combined ruthless politics with fatherly leadership qualities.

Path to Power ends at the start of WWII, immediately after Johnson failed to steal the 1941 special Senate election in Texas. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, which will detail Johnson’s 1948 election to the Senate – which Caro has already hinted that Johnson stole – and who knows what other shenanigans.

I still detest Johnson this time around, but it’s difficult not to be fascinated by the path his career takes. It reads like a Clancy novel: filled with shady backroom characters and powerful politicians throwing money around to influencing political outcomes. All that’s missing are the terrorist plots and the guns, though I think those will probably show up in the as yet unfinished volume describing Johson's presidency in the the 60s, with the escalation of the Vietnam war.